AMD RV670 presentation leaked

MadboxPC has scored an AMD presentation about the upcoming RV670, aka Radeon HD 3870/3850, and it has some interesting and some confusing information in it. Let's start from the top: the pricing has been confirmed, the 38x0 cards will be priced between US$150 and $250, which isn't exactly news in itself, but it seems like there might not be any more expensive cards this year from AMD.

However, there's a mention of a Radeon HD 3870 X2 card and this might be the mythological R680. This will apparently launch this winter as well, but we are not hold our breath. AMD is making a big deal out of the DX 10.1 support it has incorporated into the RV670 design, as well as how power efficient and cool running the RV670 is compared to the R600 or Radeon 2900 series.

There's only one performance benchmark and that is 3DMark06, where the 3870 barely beats the 2900 XT and the 3850 is some 15 percent slower than the 2900 XT. This was using an AMD 6400+ processor on an RD790 board with 2GB or RAM and the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, so we'd take those numbers with a grain of salt.

There are several slides talking about AMD's PowerPlay technology, but you can check those out yourself as they're pretty self explanatory. There's also a slide talking about CrossFireX and the option to use three or four graphcis cards, and aparently you'll be able to overclock multiple graphics cards as well.

The two slides we found particularly interesting are the last two, as they're talking about clock speeds and it seems as if AMD is as confused as anyone. On one slide they're talking 2.4GHz for the 3870 (1.2GHz x2 due to DDR memory) and the next slide talks about 2.2GHz. The same goes for the 3850, which is either going to use 1,8GHz memory or 1.66GHz memory. AMD, please make up your collective minds, at least in your own presentations.

Apparently the cards are already available, according to one of the slides, so it seems like the latter is the one that is more current. It's a shame that AMD dropped the clock speeds by this much, but hopefully the cards will overclock nicely.